Teachers Casting a Theoretical Eye Over Their Everyday Situation

Author(s):

Anita Norlund(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2011

Network:

1. Continuing Professional Development: Learning for Individuals, Leaders, and Organisations

Format:

Paper

Session Information

01 SES 07 B, School and Organizational Development

Paper Session

Time:

2011-09-14

16:45-18:15

Room:

JK 31/239,1 FL., 25

Chair:

Heinz Guenter Holtappels

Contribution

My presentation focuses on findings from a school development project. It is framed by Basil Bernstein's theory.

The aims are twofold; first, to shed light on teachers’ reactions to insights generated from a certain meeting and second, to discuss these reactions in the light of affordances and constraints to school development work.

Four secondary schools take part in the particular project. All the schools are located rurally in municipalities categorized as manufacturing. The project objectives include that teachers draw parallels between their everyday choices and theories of sociology of education.

The principals and teachers involved regularly accomplish and publish exercises at a digital area. They also take part in real-life meetings, where they discuss with each other and with a research group. This research group consists of five researchers from the regional university.

A curricular reform, School 2011, is currently being implemented in Sweden. It takes effect as from the autumn of 2011. The reform brings about rewordings of learning outcomes and new assessment criteria. It is part of a larger process, involving major changes in teacher education. Moreover, pupils from now on will get marks from sixth grade, two years earlier than previously. Due to this dynamic stage, educational matters gain much attention from a variety of actors.

Method

My findings refer to a particular real-life meeting with the teachers. It took as its starting point some quotations from actors who had shown to step into the school debate. The quotations were related to the current curricular reform in particular and to teaching and assessment matters in general. The research group intentionally chose quotations representing different recontextualization fields (Bernstein 1990, 2000). This means that textbook producers, a trade union leader, commercial companies and others gave their contributions. Such a variety of actors correspond to a variety of views on teaching and assessment, views not only shaped by different traditions but also by different ideological interests. In connection to the presentation of quotations, the research group introduced a theoretically based model of four pedagogies (Bernstein 1990). The identified pedagogies were conservative, progressive, radical and visible, radical pedagogy, with the addition of a fifth pedagogy (Norlund 2009), i. e. the entrepreneurial one. The introduction of the theoretical model was followed by group discussions, encouraging the teachers to map the quotations in question with the five pedagogies.

Expected Outcomes

The researchers function as ‘challengers’ and encourage the teachers to take a new and distant look at their everyday condition. Consequently, the purpose of the meeting was to facilitate teachers’ understanding of conflicting interests put forward from various actors. The interests connect to different pedagogies that in turn connect to varied chances for pupils from different social class backgrounds to succeed in school. The schools had initially turned to the university for this very reason, i. e. to get some help in understanding why their pupils although similar sociological conditions got remarkably different results in the national school ranking. Such ranking systems make up circumstances shared by many European countries.

References

References Bernstein, Basil. (1990). Class, codes and control. Vol. 4, The structuring of pedagogic discourse. London: Routledge. Bernstein, Basil (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: theory, research, critique. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Norlund, Anita. (2009). Kritisk sakprosaläsning i gymnasieskolan. Didaktiska perspektiv på läroböcker, lärare och nationella prov. Göteborg Studies in Educational Sciences 273. Göteborg. Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.

Author Information

Anita Norlund (presenting / submitting)

University of Borås

Department of Education & Behavioural Sciences

Borås

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